Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
. . . The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost.
. . . No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Messsage to Congress (December 8, 1941)

At 7 A.M., Hawaiian time, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, two U.S. Army privates saw something unusual on their radar screens. More than 50 planes seemed to be appearing out of the northeast. When they called in the information, they were told it was probably just part of an expected delivery of new B-17s coming from the mainland United States. They were Japanese warplanes.

At 0758 the Pearl Harbor command radioed its first message to the world. AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. An hour later, a second wave of 167 more Japanese aircraft arrived. The two raids, which had lasted only minutes, destroyed or damaged nineteen ships, eight of them eight battleships, and 292 aircraft, including 117 bombers. And 2,403 Americans, military and civilian, had been killed, with another 1,178 wounded.

Few questions have tantalized historians and students of the period more than this: Did FDR or members of his administration and military command know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and did they deliberately allow the attack that took more than 2,000 American lives in order to draw America into the most deadly, destructive war in history?

Some say FDR was preoccupied with the war in Europe and didn’t want war with Japan. Others hold that FDR viewed Japan—allied to the German-Italian Axis—as his ticket into the European war. The ultimate conclusion to this view is that FDR knew of the imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and not only failed to prevent it, but welcomed it as the turning point that would end obstruction of his war plans.

There is no longer any doubt that some Americans knew that “zero hour,” as the Japanese ambassador to Washington called the planned attack, was scheduled for December 7. According to John Toland’s account of Pearl Harbor, Infamy, Americans had not only broken the Japanese code, but the Dutch had done so as well, and their warnings had been passed on to Washington.

Here is where human frailty and overconfidence, and even American racism, take over. Most American military planners expected a Japanese attack to come in the Philippines, America’s major base in the Pacific; the American naval fortifications at Pearl Harbor were believed to be invulnerable to attack, as well as too far away for the Japanese.

While the conspiracy theorists persist, a convincing case for Roosevelt trying to avoid war with Japan has been made by many prominent historians. Among them, eminent British military historian John Keegan dismisses the conspiracy notion.

“These charges defy logic,” Keegan wrote in The Second World War. “Churchill certainly did not want war against Japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only American assistance in the fight against Hitler. . . .”

The U.S. Navy’s History and Heritage Command has an extensive collection of online documents and resources related to the Pearl Harbor attack:
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-1.htm
This is the National Park Service link to World War II Pacific sites;
http://www.nps.gov/valr/index.htm

Find more on Pearl Harbor and World War II in Don’t Know Much About History

With Presidents Day around the corner, it seems like a good time to think about some other great books about the Presidents and Presidency. Here is a short list of some of my favorite Presidential biographies –all what I call “must reads.” Obviously, this not an exhaustive list, and some may already be familiar. Not all of them focus on the presidential years of the subjects. But this is a good place to start with a collection of accessible and fascinating views of the lives and careers of some of the most significant Commanders in Chief –all told by great storytellers, great writers and great historians.
Since Presidents Day exists to honor Washington and Lincoln, I’ll start with them–

Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington by Richard Brookhiser. Fairly brief, mostly admiring but honest, and to the point, Brookhiser of the National Review, cuts through the mythology but keeps Washington firmly in place as “Father of Our Country.”
Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek. Rather than an exhaustive biography, this is a study of Washington’s complicated relationship to slavery and his views on emancipation.

Speaking of Emancipation, The Lincoln Library is enormous. But if I had to pick one single-volume biography of “The Great Emancipator,” I choose With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates. I like it for its readability and utterly human portrait of one most mythologized of Presidents. A close second to Oates is Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography by Philip B. Kunhardt. Jr., Philip Kunhardt III and Peter W. Kunhardt is a beautiful volume, a “coffee table” book that won’t just sit on the coffee table. It might be especially valuable for households with children, as is Lincoln: A Photobiography, an award-winning book for children by the appropriately named Russell Freedman.

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough is one of my favorite biographies, although it focuses not on TR’s astonishing Presidency but on his youth. A magnificent book.
For Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency, read Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

For the “other Roosevelt, another of my all time favorite books is Doris Kearn Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. It focuses life in the White House during the war years and is the perfect combination of scholarship and great storytelling
Because FDR’s historic “First Hundred Days” got so much attention recently, I would also recommend this fairly slim but excellent overview of the Depression and Roosevelt’s controversial, much-debated response to it: The First Hundred Days by Anthony Badger

For FDR’s successor, the gold standard is Truman by David McCullough

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro. Until Caro finishes the fourth installment of his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson, this book, covering Johnson’s years as the Senator from Texas will have to do.

President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime by Lou Cannon. A California journalist, Cannon covered Reagan for years and this is an even-handed assessment.

A comprehensive reading list of these and Presidential biographies can also be found in Don’t Know Much About History

WHO: Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany had absorbed Austria in the Anschluss (annexation) in March 1938. Then Hitler demanded the return of the German Sudetenland, Czech territory since 1918, in September 1938.

WHEN: At a September 1938 conference in Munich, the prime ministers of Great Britain and France accepted Hitler’s demands and pressed the Czechs to turn over the land. That was simply Hitler’s prelude to a more ambitious conquest.

In early 1939, recognizing the paucity of resistance, Hitler simply took the rest of Czechoslovakia . Next he set his sights on Poland, demanding the city of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk).
In August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a secret nonaggression pact, a prelude to a joint attack on Poland by Germany from the West and the Red Army from the East.

WHY: On the pretext of a Polish attack on Germany, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviets moved into Poland on September 16.
Here is the New York times front page story of the German invasion:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0901.html#article

France and England could stand by no longer. Both countries declared war on Germany on September 3.

In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt lacked the votes to overturn the Neutrality Act that prevented him from arming France and Great Britain for the war that FDR knew was coming but was now a reality.

A complete overview of World War II can be found in Don’t Know Much About History